Aid and comfort by any other name

At NRO, Columbia undergrads David Feith and Jordan Hirsch explain to President Bollinger a few of the basic considerations that show how Columbia is disgracing itself today: “Aid and comfort by any other name.” At NRO’s Corner, Noah Pollak recalls William F. Buckley’s appeal to the Yale Political Union not to host the American Communist Party functionary Gus Hall as a speaker. Buckley’s speech is reprinted in The Jeweler’s Eye, where Buckley adds this preface:

In the fall of 1962 the Yale Political Union invited Gus Hall, secretary of the Communist Party of the United States, to address it later in the season. The speaker scheduled at the meeting immediately preceding Gus Hall was myself. I wrote to the PU to say that I declined to appear as one speaker in the same series that included a Communist Party functionary. However, I said, if the invitation to Mr. Hall were reissued as contingent upon the vote of the PU at the end of an evening’s discussion on the question, “Resolved, that a Communist functionary should not be invited to speak at Yale, then I would appear — to defend the negative of the resolution. My terms were accepted and the debate was held. The negative carried the house, and the invitation to Gus Hall was withdrawn.

See also Harry Jaffa’s invaluable essay “On the nature of civil and religious liberty,” reprinted in Keeping the Tablets, ed. by William F. Buckley and Charles Kesler.